That's the take home message from Opera Software ASA's (OSE:OPERA) somewhat surprising announcement that it is going to transition to the WebKit platform, taking its 300 million plus users with it.

I. Opera Joins Up

Opera boasts tens of millions of desktop users, but is a niche player in the desktop browser market compared to the likes of Google Inc. (GOOG), Apple, Inc. (AAPL), The Mozilla Foundation, and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). However, Opera has relatively strong market shares in both the third party mobile browser (smartphones/tablets) and [gaming] console markets.

Opera long used a rendering engine (also known as a "layout engine") named Presto. Opera's work with Presto was important to the internet, as the Norwegian company often pushed web standards that other plays like Microsoft or Mozilla were slower to adopt.

Mozilla uses an open source rendering engine named Gecko, and Microsoft uses a proprietary engine named Trident. But between Safari (Apple) and Chrome (Google), WebKit is estimated by market research firm StatCounter to be the world's most used layout engine with more than a 40 percent market share.

WebKit is published under a mixture of GNU LGPLv2.1 and BSD v2.0 licenses and thus is consider relatively "open source".

II. First WebKit Product on the Way

At Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Spain, Opera plans to show off the first fruits of its new WebKit development path, unveiling an Android browser based on WebKit.

Opera will release new mobile and desktop browsers based on WebKit.

Opera's chief technology officer Håkon Wium Lie says the shift to WebKit should free up development resources for Opera. That makes sense -- Opera is a small company and trying to develop the world's fastest rendering engine and developing the best browser user interface is a potentially infeasible goal.

Comments Mr. Lie, "The shift to WebKit means more of our resources can be dedicated to developing new features and the user-friendly solutions that can be expected from a company that invented so many of the features that are today being used by everyone in the browser industry."

?If switching to WebKit allows us to accelerate our growth and become an important contributor to the project (we will contribute back to WebKit, and have already submitted our first patch (bug)), we may finally have a direct impact on the way web sites are coded. We want sites to be coded for open standards rather than specific browsers.

An official poll showed that Opera users aren't so sure. 45 percent said it was a bad idea; 31 percent were "not sure"; and only 23 percent were convinced it was a "good idea".

This changes nothing. Opera had full control over their codebase before. They will have full control over their code base after. While it seems like they'll be trying to stick to the mainline branch, there's also nothing stopping Opera from deciding to fork and take WebKit in a completely different direction from Apple/Google.

Consider that WebKit is itself a fork of KHTML... Consider also how different Safari and Chrome are, despite sharing the same layout engine. There's a heck of a lot more to a web browser than the layout engine.

quote: Consider that WebKit is itself a fork of KHTML... Consider also how different Safari and Chrome are, despite sharing the same layout engine. There's a heck of a lot more to a web browser than the layout engine.

Exactly. Browser diversity sitting on top of a ubiquitous feature rich, developing, open source, common render engine garnering development input from many sources seems to me to be a perfect sort of set up.

quote: Browser diversity ... common render engine ... seems to me to be a perfect sort of set up

I disagree. Multiple independent developers with their own engine help encourage innovation and enforce compliance between all parties.

Fewer engines will mean less innovation, and an increased risk we end up with a repeat of "Internet Explorer" standards on many sites because it has become the dominant browser (though this time around the jury is still out on which of the three it will be).

quote: Multiple independent developers with their own engine help encourage innovation and enforce compliance between all parties.

This statement is contradictory. The more differing engines you have, the harder it is to enforce standards compliance. Particularly when the engines are proprietary and dominate market share and the companies that control them refuse to engage in standards compliance (e.g. Trident in past years).

Encouraging innovation I'm not so sure about either. I'd probably say Opera will be more innovative after this move as maintaining Presto would have consumed a huge amount of their resources for very little gain or competitive advantage. Any potential competitive advantage they had in Presto they can develop into Webkit if they really want. If other contributors don't want it in the main branch, that's what forking is for.

If Presto was open source then your statement would have some merit. But this is a good thing for Opera and the Webkit project will benefit from their expertise. Win win really.

I think a lot of people don't get open source. Opera can freely create a branch of the source code, add their own innovations, and still copy in (using version control software like git) any bug fixes or features that Apple/Google make. It does not require them to use a single monolithic version in their browser.

They can still innovate away just as they always have - far more efficiently since they now benefit from bug fixes coming from Chrome/Safari users (vs their own minor userbase along towards Presto).

quote: I disagree. Multiple independent developers with their own engine help encourage innovation and enforce compliance between all parties.

That doesn't make sense. The whole reason open platforms like Webkit improve so rapidly, are so robust, and are so standards compliant, is that you have numerous entities making improvements to a single engine.

The main "proprietary" browser improvements are in the front end (ie - Google's excellent and revolutionary work with the Chrome UI), and this is where Opera can continue to innovate on their own browser.

As far as the back end goes, Opera was previously limited to their own improvements in Presto. Now they also benefit from bug fixes and optimizations from Chrome and Safari users/developers, and vice versa.

Whatever they invented (and they did new stuff, unlike others that just sue), has rarely, if ever, had to do with rendering. Off the top of my head, Opera gave us tabs, speed-dial, mouse gestures, low memory usage and traffic compression for mobile. I think they can switch to Webkit and still be able to innovate/invent. And if they contribute to Webkit, there's even more win for everyone. The only real danger is Webkit being resistant to changes, but I would assume Opera did their due diligence before announcing the switch.